from the mama-government dept

The nanny-state arms race marches on, apparently. Whereas the previous intersection of overbearing government and technology has resulted in politicians attempting to ban the use of headphones while walking across the street, governments introducing all manner of silly policies in the name of "protecting the children", and even municipalities attempting to run psy-ops on citizens to keep them from smoking, Taiwan appears to be taking an even more direct approach with plans to fine the parents of children the government has deemed spend too much time with electronics.

Under rules passed last Friday by Taiwanese politicians, children under the age of two should be completely banned from using electronic devices, Xinhua, China's official news agency reported. Meanwhile under-18s should not be allowed to "constantly use electronic products for a period of time that is not reasonable". It means electronic products are now listed alongside cigarettes and alcohol as potentially dangerous vices.

And you can see their point, assuming you're a crazy person. Because electronics are tools primarily of communication and productivity, even if they're also used for entertainment, and government intrusion on young people's ability to communicate, learn, and be entertained is so far removed from alcohol and tobacco that one wonders how the argument was made with a straight face to begin with. The prospective "too much time" part of this legal equation has yet to be ironed out, but the brainchild for the law is, shall we say, more than slightly aggressive on the topic.

The new regulation is the brainchild of Lu Shiow-yen, a Taiwanese member of parliament who said his intention was to protect young people by stopping them using electronic devices for more than 30 minutes at a time. Parents who break the rules can be hit with fines of up to about £1,000 although it remains unclear how authorities will determine what amount of time is unreasonable.

There's a million reasons why this is stupid, but I'll boil it down to one specific reason: baseball. Baseball is huge in Taiwan. Baseball is enjoyed primarily on television and streaming electronic devices. And baseball, for all its wonderful aspects, takes roughly as much time as it takes for a mountain to form in the Nebraska prairie. Thirty-minute stretches of time as a limit effectively outlaws youngsters watching baseball. Put in that context, and really any other context, these sorts of artificial limitations on the electronics that dominate our lives (in a good way) are ludicrous.

Expect either the backlash here to be huge, or the law to go largely ignored. Either way, this is a political non-starter.

from the building-on-sunflowers dept

Back in April, we wrote about massive protests that took place in Taiwan as a result of a lack of transparency during trade negotiations with mainland China. Those protests became part of what is now known as the Sunflower student movement, whose name refers to the use of sunflowers by the protesters as a symbol of hope. Techpresident has a fascinating article looking at the Taiwanese online community called g0v, which has been playing a key part in the Sunflower movement, and which is now trying to make government more open and accessible using open source tools:

g0v believes that current online participation tools like social media outlets and online message boards fell short in creating offline action or collaboration. g0v places itself at the center of open-sourced, hands-on, and public-spirited activism with a desire to engage citizens to create real social change.

g0v's work is proving that open-source communities can successfully open up and improve government. Ideologically, g0v does not believe that its activism needs to create an enemy out of government, but rather that everyone -- the government and the people -- wins when creative solutions improve existing public structures.

The post goes on to describe g0v's hackathons, its first conference, and the Open Political Donation Project. This brought together 9,000 volunteers to digitize 300,000 political donation records as a pointed response to Taiwan's old Campaign Donation Act of 2004, which allowed the public access to campaign donation documents, but only as a paper copy, or in person at a government office.

What's fascinating here is to see how the people involved in the Sunflower student movement have moved on from simply protesting against something -- Taiwan's secret trade negotiations with China -- to creating new tools to open up government and engage citizens. As the Techpresident piece concludes:

g0v's brand of activism is about making sure government does its job better. g0v explains on its website, it substituted the "o" in gov for a "0" to change the way we see government working. Through civic tech, hacktivism, and a belief that government can and should work, g0v is already showing that it can change the way that government sees itself and the way that people can interact with their government.

from the this-will-surely-'work' dept

Back during the fervor over distracted driving discussions that generally looked to paint smart phones as a mythical human-murdering device that required new legislation in the realm of automobiles, one common refrain centered around the question of whether we'd take the next illogical step and ban walking while talking on phones or texting. Even Mike, our most esteemed leader, made such a quip: "will we now see legislation proposed to ban walking while yakking on your mobile phone as well?" Pssh, of course we will.

Looking to make crossing the street a little safer, Taiwanese legislators have proposed fining pedestrians who cross the street while "distracted" by mobile phones. The proposed law will fine any pedestrian deemed "distracted" about $10 for each infraction! According to Taiwanese media, there are over 14,000,000 mobile internet users in Taiwan, many of whom are supposedly "addicted" to their smartphones. This smartphone addiction has supposedly led to various traffic accidents on the island, so much so that 17 legislators have put forth a new law to fine distracted walkers.

There's that addiction word, which has already gone such a long way towards removing any responsibility people have for their own actions in the past. Time for the government to step in and do a little social engineering through...$10 fines? That doesn't seem like it will serve all that well as a deterrent. Hell, here in the States, we have people facing jail time and license revocation for drunken driving leave the courtroom and immediately get in their cars. What's $10 going to do? And what examples do we have that such a fine is necessary to begin with?

Taiwan's Apple Daily gave an example of a young woman in Kaoshuing, Taiwan. In late March, this young woman was crossing the street and, while she was distracted by her phone, she was hit by an oncoming taxi cab. She later passed away in the hospital.

I don't know, it seems to me that tossing a $10 fine into the woman's grave with her isn't so much passing effective legislation as it is pissing on someone's casket. Add to that the reports that these politicians are supposedly looking to emulate several failed traffic laws here in the States and I wonder whether everyone might just need a good solid midday nap so we can all get back to being sane.

Oddly, the report's own survey found that something like 80% of people responding to the poll are in favor of the fine. The report did not clarify whether respondents did so on smart phones while they were walking alongside a busy highway, but I like to think they were. Any chance we could just go with a little common sense education of the walking dead public, instead? Naaaaah.

from the sound-familiar? dept

One of the key problems with both the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), is the lack of scrutiny. Both deals are being negotiated in almost complete secrecy, with very little information being released officially. The justification for this, such as it is, is that the public will have a chance to see the agreements once they are finished, and that this is the appropriate time for transparency. The emptiness of that promise has been shown by the Polish Ministry of Economy's reply to some questions from the Modern Poland Foundation:

all the information the EU member states obtained from the European Commission is classified and it is not possible to pass it on outside the state administration. This also concerns the Foundation's request to access the text of the chapter on IPR and the Polish stance in this matter.

In compliance with the EU practices, the text of the treaty will be made available only in the final stage of the negotiations, after the signing of the document by both parties.

As that makes clear, the public will only get to see TTIP after it has been signed, when it can no longer be changed. The European Commissioners' idea of transparency turns out to be a cruel joke at the expense of the public that pays their not-inconsiderable salaries.

Large crowds of demonstrators took to the streets of Taipei to protest efforts by the government to approve a trade pact with Beijing and show support for the students who have occupied Taiwan's legislature for nearly two weeks.

Organizers estimated that at least 350,000 people were gathered, as of 2 p.m., on the streets around the Presidential Office Building to express discontent over a pact that would open up dozens of service fields to cross-strait investment. Police counted 116,000 demonstrators by 4 p.m., according to Taiwan's Central News Agency, while some television news stations put the number as high as 700,000.

As the New York Times article quote above explains, a key complaint is the fact that there would be no meaningful scrutiny:

While many demonstrators are opposed to the service trade pact, the most widely held complaint was that the measure has not been sufficiently examined. A poll before the occupation of the legislature indicated that more than 70 percent of respondents supported a line-by-line review of the pact.

That line-by-line review is precisely what granting "fast track authority" to the White House and USTR would make impossible for TPP and TTIP; instead, Congress would have a single "yes" or "no" vote on whether to accept one or both.
The ACTA demonstrations in Europe led to the agreement being rejected by the European Parliament two years ago; now it looks like the Taiwanese authorities have also admitted defeat:

On Saturday, [Taiwan's President] Mr. Ma attempted to respond to some of the students' demands, saying he would back an itemized review of the trade pact and a law that would allow the legislature to more closely monitor agreements with Beijing.

In the light of the massive protests that swept through Europe in 2012, and those now filling the streets of Taipei, both of which were triggered by the refusal to allow any meaningful scrutiny of trade agreements that would have major consequences for everyday life, the question has to be: do the USTR and European Commission really want to run the risk of repeating that experience by pushing through TPP and TTIP in exactly the same undemocratic manner?

from the why-not-just-compete? dept

At some point companies and organizations are going to have to learn that astroturfing is going to accomplish absolutely nothing positive and almost certainly a whole lot of negative. The practice of faking support through BS internet comments is every bit as petty and stupid as it sounds, resulting in these folks either looking really silly or downright hypocritical. That said, it's one thing to astroturf for what typically amounts to a crappy cause, but it's quite another level of dumb when you do it to try to influence consumer behavior purely as a business practice.

For instance, take Samsung, which has been the king of the mobile phone market for the past few years. It's now been fined by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) for splashing fake comments all over the internet demeaning HTC phones while favoring its own.

In a notice on its website, the consumer protection body said that Samsung had organized an Internet campaign in violation of fair trade rules to praise Samsung smartphones while slamming those of HTC. The FTC set Samsung's fine at New Taiwan dollars 10 million ($340,000). It also leveled smaller fines on two Taiwanese trading companies it said were responsible for mounting the Internet campaign.

It should be noted that this isn't the first time Samsung has been fined for misleading behavior, having faced FTC sanctions mere months ago over the way they mislead consumers about some of the camera functions on their phones. Now, $340k may not seem like that big a deal, and it probably isn't, but you and any potential Samsung partners should be looking at this as a symptom, not the disease.

Even as Samsung has been leading the market lately, this sends a clear message to anyone paying attention that Samsung doesn't think it can actually compete fairly in the marketplace. The company apparently believes they're best bet is to generate positive outlook on their phones by faking grassroot support as opposed to actually earning it. That's a problem in and of itself, but add to it a drop in confidence and favorability now that the astroturfing campaign has been exposed and the corporate-meltdown pump has been primed. Samsung may want to remind itself of the fate of Nokia -- another company that was once at the top of the heap in mobile phones, before it became complacent on innovation and learned how quickly a market can move in a different direction.

from the just-the-facts dept

Last week we reported on the suspension of Hadopi's one and only suspension, as France moved away from using Internet disconnection as a punishment. That manifest failure of the scheme that pioneered the three strikes approach makes a new paper from the Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin, called "Evaluating graduated response", particularly timely. As its title suggests, this is a review of the three strikes approach in the light of the experiences in the five countries that have adopted it: France, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea and the UK -- even though the latter has still not put it into practice.

The paper begins with a review of those schemes, as well as of the two "voluntary" approaches adopted by the US and Ireland. This makes it probably the best single source for details of how all those implementations of the idea work, and is worth reading for that alone. But the real focus of this research lies elsewhere. As Giblin explains, her paper is not looking at important aspects of the three strikes approach such as lack of due process, privacy, transparency, accuracy and proportionality, because these have been addressed elsewhere. Instead, she says:

its focus is on identifying, synthesizing and evaluating the evidence of the effects of the various graduated response schemes in order to determine the extent to which they are achieving any of the copyright law's aims.

Or, to put it more simply: does three strikes work, in any sense?

The first issue she looks at is to what extent graduated response reduces copyright infringement. Most of her analysis concerns Hadopi, simply because we have far more information about it than about the other schemes around the world. Here's what Giblin found on this score:

every figure it cited in support of the claim that the French law reduces infringement was supplied by one or more organizations that is closely allied to the interests of major rightholders, and which, in several cases, has a strong and obvious vested interest in promoting graduated response. None of them appear to have been subjected to peer review or have made their full reports or methodologies available for public scrutiny.

It's the old story: research "proving" the efficacy of harsh enforcement measures turns out to be have been commissioned by the copyright companies, and usually comes without any methodology that can be examined in order to establish its trustworthiness. But Giblin has been able to bring together what few facts have been released about Hadopi, and comes up with some interesting results:

working from the information that has been made publicly available, this analysis demonstrates that, if you're going to take anything from the [Hadopi warning] notice volume data, it's that the amount of infringement committed between the issue of first and second notices might actually have increased.

In other words, far from decreasing illegal downloads, Hadopi seems to have led to an increase. As she summarizes:

France has been described as "very much the gold standard for graduated response public law". However, when the data is carefully considered, there is scant evidence that the law actually reduces infringement. Since the dearth of infringement actions in its first three years of operation cannot be explained by a reduction in infringement, the most likely remaining explanation is simply that it is not very well equipped to identify and process the most egregious repeat offenders.

Giblin then goes on to consider to what extent graduated response maximizes authorized uses. The point is that supporters of the three strikes approach often claim that it will push people to legal channels. In this section we meet the Danaher study, which purported to show Hadopi had a positive impact on iTunes sales in France. But as we noted last year, an alternative explanation is that the introduction of new iPhone models produced the observed peaks in iTunes sales -- something with which Giblin concurs:

the resulting graph demonstrates a far more powerful correlation between the iTunes sales and French users' Google searches for "iPhone" than for searches for "HADOPI".

And adds:

Even if there was some "Hadopi effect" as suggested by the Danaher study, there is no evidence of its replication or sustainment in the recorded music or audio-visual environments.

Giblin summarizes:

As this analysis has demonstrated, there’s little persuasive evidence showing a causal link between graduated response and increased legitimate usage.

The final question she addresses is to what extent graduated response promotes learning and culture by encouraging the creation and dissemination of creative materials. That's an issue, because you would hope that three strikes approaches would lead to more creativity, not just fewer unauthorized downloads. But as Giblin points out:

An under-recognized feature of many existing graduated responses is that their design ensures that not all content (or content owners) are treated equally.

That's hugely important for smaller countries that have brought in or are contemplating bringing in three strikes approaches, since it means that it may not do their local music industry much good. Here's what she observed happening in New Zealand, for example:

Every case has involved infringements of music performed by international artists such Beyoncé, Coldplay and Elton John. Not a single local New Zealand artist has featured. This can be at least partly explained by the fact that the biggest international artists are most likely to attract the most interest from illegal downloaders, and thus have a greater chance of detection. However, the clear message is that infringers are only at risk if they step on the toes of powerful international rightholders. Other content owners and creators, who may also be facing serious challenges from widespread infringement, effectively receive less protection than the majors.

But overall, Giblin finds that the three strikes approach has been so ineffectual that these structural biases probably don't matter much:

given the lack of evidence that graduated response does anything to reduce infringement or increase legitimate markets, these structural biases in favor of Big Content may have little or no effect in practice.

She concludes with some key points:

International regulators considering implementation of new graduated responses must be surer than ever to carefully consider the policy aims they wish to achieve, and to evaluate whether the proposals on the table would actually help to do so. And regulators who have already enacted graduated response laws should take a close look at the evidence and consider whether it is desirable to maintain them in their current forms. If not, perhaps they should follow the French lead and rollback or repeal. Much can be done to design copyright law in ways that will help achieve desired aims. But the graduated responses in place right now overwhelmingly fail to do so.

This is an important piece of work, because for the first time it gathers a wide range of evidence on whether three strikes actually achieves any of its possible aims. As such, it should be indispensable reading for policy-makers contemplating taking this route, not least because the well-documented failure of the costly French Hadopi scheme must call into question whether it is even worth considering at all.

from the like-that-wasn't-predictable dept

At the end of May, we wrote about the Taiwanese government's bizarre proposal to create a copyright bill that was like SOPA, but even worse. Apparently, the folks at the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (IPO) had slept through the whole SOPA thing. Thankfully, the Taiwanese quickly did their own version of the SOPA blackout, with Wikipedia Taiwan and Mozilla Taiwan set to participate. However, seeing the writing on the wall (and, perhaps, someone showed the IPO folks what happened in the US), and the proposal was abandoned before the protest was even needed.

Of course, it's not completely over:

In the face of these criticisms and the planned blackout, the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office abandoned this severe copyright law. In its announcement, the office stated that this plan would be “adjusted.” It’s clear that the government intends to introduce another copyright enforcement initiative in the future. Still, it’s enormously encouraging to see how users in Taiwan have organized to defend their rights and successfully stopped this draconian blacklist law.

The unfortunate reality is that many government authorities around the world still buy into the belief that the health of the Internet is acceptable collateral damage in this manufactured war on copyright infringement. Lawmakers need to understand that creativity and innovation can only thrive when our platforms remain open, where users are free to share and experiment with content. While it’s clear that the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office did not learn from the mistakes of SOPA and PIPA in the U.S., let’s hope others see the defeat of this latest copyright blacklist law and recognize that users will not put up with efforts to censor the Internet.

Still, it is good to see that whenever something SOPA-like pops up, the public quickly jumps up to protest it.

from the overkill-much? dept

You might have hoped that the extensive discussions that took place around SOPA a year or so ago would have warned off governments elsewhere from replicating some of the really bad ideas there, like DNS blocking, but it seems that Taiwan didn't get the message, as Global Voices reports:

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has recently proposed to amend the Copyright Act and provide legal justification of IP and DNS blocking at the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) level through a black list system. The government claims that the amendment is to stop the illegal sharing of copyright movies and music.

Although IPO has stressed that the Internet service providers will only block overseas online platforms which are "specifically designed for copyright infringement activities" or websites which have "obviously violated copyrights", such as Megaupload, the authorities will target online platforms that enhance peer-to-peer transmission including Bit Torrent, Foxy, and FTP sharing.

Of course, as Techdirt readers know, there is no such thing as "obviously violated copyrights" -- that's what judges are for. The idea of of targeting technologies like BitTorrent and FTP is nothing less than an attack on aspects of the Internet itself. And as the article points out, the new powers are almost certain to be abused:

If the Taiwanese copyright amendment is implemented, the Island will have a mechanism that blocks and filters away "illegal websites" that host material that infringes copyright laws. This could be detrimental to sites like YouTube, where users regularly upload videos that may violate copyright laws. Although the company has a system for removing these videos, a law like this could lead to the site being blocked altogether.

The new measures will move Taiwan closer to China's Great Firewall in terms of censorship, and will therefore probably be well-received on the mainland as a result. But there are surely better ways of improving relations between the two countries than instituting these kind of measures that won't stop people sharing unauthorized copies online, but will damage the Internet, and not just in Taiwan.

from the we-know-it-when-we-see-it dept

The awkward question of whether porn can be covered by copyright (and not much else, amirightgents?) has been debated a time or two on this side of the world. In 2011, some discussion revolved around the protection of "obscene materials," namely the protection extended to porn by the Fifth Circuit Court in a 1979 case involving a porn producer and a chain of adult theaters. This decision was cited in a lengthy footnote appended to a lawsuit filed by Liberty Media against 18 John Does.

In 2012, the argument was made that pornography doesn't "promote progress," therefore it should not be entitled to copyright protection. This particular argument is a rather dangerous one (and composed almost entirely of slope grease) as it puts the extension copyright protection in the hands of the court and allows it to determine whether a piece of erotica is art or "just porn." (The case was closed before this conversation could really get started.)

For years producers of porn movies in Japan have bemoaned the lack of protection their content has received in Taiwan.

In 2010 things came to a head. The leading producers of the 20,000+ adult movies released in Japan each year warned Taiwan that if it didn’t get tough on pirates selling their content on websites and even airing it on TV, legal action would follow.

Taiwan's prosecutors said Wednesday that Taiwanese firms that use Japanese-made pornographic films to make profits online have not violated Japanese producers' copyrights.

The Taipei District Court's Prosecutors Office therefore announced it will not press charges against Elta Technologies Co. Ltd, and 10 other Taiwanese firms that the Japanese studios accused of violating their copyrights.

Despite the producers' arguments that each film was unique and expressed singular artistic vision, prosecutors refused to budge, stating that Taiwan's Supreme Court affords copyright protection only to "works of literature, science and arts." According to the court, porn is not included, therefore it has no "copyright" to be infringed.

This disappointing decision prompting the Japanese porn producers to take another approach, and start calling the kettle black... for litigious reasons.

In a sign of how desperate they had become, the Japanese companies added that if they had no remedy under copyright law, they would sue the pirates for spreading obscene material and damaging the health of Taiwan’s children.

As crazy as it sounds this approach had the potential to work. While authorities have done nothing to protect copyrights of adult material, they do arrest people for distributing obscene material.

Ah, the "for the children" tactic. It's been used here before as justification for SOPA and various computer-snooping plans. This is a bit different, however, as it flips the script on the pirates, turning them from enemies of porn producers to enemies of the state. It's an approach that takes a very oblique angle, but when the usual stuff isn't working, it's time to bust out the "just-crazy-enough-to-work" options.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. (Not crazy enough??)

[T]he adult producer’s claims that the pirates were spreading obscene material and damaging children didn’t gain any ground either. The prosecutors decided that since the pirate sites displayed warnings and blocked minors from accessing their websites then there was no case to answer there either.

At this point, it looks as if Japan's porn producers are out of options, at least in terms of preventing piracy in Taiwan. The court tells them their work is too dirty to protect. They counter by saying their work is too dirty to distribute. The court says (paraphrasing) "It's ok, these sites are using protection." I doubt these producers really want to push the issue of having porn declared a protectable art form and leave the defining line between protectable art and unprotected obscenity in the hands (and minds) of government officials. Perhaps these producers should just concede the battle and focus on areas where they have the protection, or at least, paying customers.

from the they're-not-the-same dept

Slashdot points us to an article about a new research report, commissioned by a biotech trade group that argues the evidence shows that patents spur innovation, rather than hinder it. However, as some quickly noticed, the report has severe methodological flaws, starting with the fact that it seems to use patent activity as a proxy for innovation. So, it argues that stronger patent law creates more patents (or more funding of patents or more sales/licensing of patents) -- and then claims that clearly there's more innovation. But we already knew that patent laws spur patents. The question -- not answered in the report -- is about the actual impact on innovation.

Just as an example, the report provides some case studies from different countries. In one of them, it talks about how Taiwan basically took the US' Bayh-Dole Act, which encourages the locking up of university research... and shows there was much more patenting afterwards. The report discusses how "impressive" this is:

A 2010 study of the effects of this legislation on university patenting activity provides a concrete
and detailed example of the positive effect the introduction of technology transfer mechanisms
can have.
The study examines patents granted to 174 Taiwanese universities during the period
of 2004 to 2009 and compares this to the period preceding it. Strikingly, the study finds a sharp
and sustained increase in university’s patenting activity: patenting increased from 446 patents in
2004 to 1,581 by 2009.
This is an impressive increase of 354%. As importantly, apart from a
slight drop in 2007, this growth has been progressive and sustained year after year.

Yup. So patent laws that expand the coverage of what's patentable and provide incentives for more patents... increase the number patents. What does that say about innovation? Abso-freaking-lutely nothing. And, in fact, if you look at the actual research on the impact of Bayh-Dole in the US, while it similarly increased patent activity, it didn't increase research, and actually held it back. This is because university research is meant to be shared and meant to be discussed and to have others work on it. That's how great research is done: with lots of sharing of information and ideas to spark new thinking. But the Bayh-Dole Act basically told researchers to shut up, keep things secret, and patent the results. Because of that there are a lot more patents, but a lot fewer real breakthroughs, because you no longer have the same information sharing, discussion and openness that created true innovation in the past.